‘Me Allow me to wander through the dead like an eyeless insect,” writes Harlan Ellison in his seminal sci-fi horror work I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. First person his puzzle his Scorn’s corrupt biomechanical hellscape of his game grants similar permission to roam its world on a short leash, as if at the behest of a terrifying intellect. It imposes paranoia on play as if it were simply allowed. It’s a world you enter stripped and emaciated as you journey from darkness to transcendental despair you haven’t felt since Pascal Roget’s infamous horror film The Martyr.
The devs describe the setting as “a nightmarish universe of weird shapes and gloomy tapestries”, and it’s probably all you need to know about the world and its stories. Fear is everywhere. Rest only brings violent depression. Disdain is an incredibly evocative work of art, and what it evokes is so offensive that throughout a week of play he had to ration in hour-long sessions.
Ellison has been labeled technophobic (which he later denied), but it would be hard to cast such a charge at Ebb Software’s feet. Scorn often feels like an austere celebration of the immersive quality of a consuming and realized virtual world. The thing has certainly left an imprint on my psyche. Like Hellraiser’s Cenobites, it gives us such a spectacle.
It’s a grotesque and surrealist spectacle, but there’s an undeniable truth to it all, as it draws much of its inspiration from the art of HR Giger and Zdzislaw Beksinski. truthfulness. A satirical, gruesome portrait of the human body as a fleshy sprocket and a leak of liquid used to crush an insatiable industry. I’m sure its inspiration is much more far-reaching, but we see the scars of the game’s grueling decade-long development cycle in the terrifying marriage of flesh and machine inhabiting a decaying city. It is difficult to
You’ll need to solve puzzles to progress through that space, trying to find meaning to grasp. As the primary means of interfacing with the world, these issues allow for a strange kind of familiarity. In other words, a shared language of logic with an otherwise disparate world. Or the occasionally attenuating mediocre intrusions into illusions for not being benevolent. Not that these are bad logic puzzles – some are quite satisfying. Nothing pulls you out of your nightmare like you have to solve it. Ebb can feel like he struggled to place interactive hurdles between one place and the next.
Still, it’s easy to forgive in a place like this. Cyclopaean. Graveology. Each one is frighteningly vast, yet curated down to the smallest writhing detail. It’s not just the feeling that everything is going through eternity, but that eternity seems to pass before you from chapter to chapter. The brief combat encounters are tense but sparse, neither a highlight nor a detriment, but the creature designs are delightfully terrifying. It’s an undeniably bitter taste designed with bold artistry.
